Yesterday Danny Sullivan published an article over at Search Engine Land discussing Google Universal Search. In his article he discusses how Universal Search has evolved in the short time since it debuted last year.

Today Universal Search results are displayed based mostly on relevance and blended in with the natural search results. While it is very common for news, images, and other vertical search results to be displayed at the top of the page, more and more cases are being found with these being injected, or blended, right into the midst of things (for example in the #4 or #5 position, based entirely on relevance).

Universal Search does not only display results based on Google news, but also looks at videos, images, maps, and other search relevant results from Google’s various vertical search listings.

Danny goes into significant detail in outlining various examples including screen shots, showing how Local, Image, News, and Video results are blended into the normal results pages. While today we are seeing many of these verticals blended in, Video search is the most consistent. This is no surprise given that Video is appearing everywhere these days, and accounts for a large part of total internet uses (an estimated 3 billion video’s were watched in November on Google properties alone).